School shootings are what most schools in the country fear happening in their institutions. The bearacade is advantageous to some point and disadvantageous at the same time but ultimately it acts as a good way of ensuring that children and people are safe in schools and other buildings while they learn and work respectively. William, the device should be placed somewhere that is only accessible by certain specific people in the room.

Charles, I had thought that it was simply a spelling error that got past the spell checker.

I would think that if there is enough clearance to get that under the door that there would also be enough clearance to get a large pry bar under the door. I would also presume that a single 45 caliber military pistol round fired at the door about 3 inches above the thing, from a distance of 8 feet, would render the door openable. Certainly a second and third shot to that area would leave plenty of clearance for the door to swing over the blocker device. Of course a would-be attacker may not be aware of this.

The arrangement that I saw that would always be effective is one that I saw at a liquer store near Detroit. It had two independant round-ball style doorknobs vertically spaced a foot apart on the door to the managers office, which then required using both hands to open the door. It was not possible to open the door holding anything else. Of course, that managers office also had several shotguns on racks, ready for use. Probably shotguns in a classroom is a poor idea. But the double knobs thing was quite brilliant, I thought.

@Ttemp, so how about forgetting the PC demons and telling us what you believe to be the actual cause of the problem? I have a few theories but no research to support them. Thus they are simply theories that I have. So mostly I don't share them a lot.

I tend to share ideas that I can prove are correct, or that have a lot of research backing themup as correct. Very few argue with those ideas.

I hadn't thought of it as a reference to bears, William K, but that actually makes sense. The name "Bearacade" probably makes more sense for a product that keeps bears out of homes and businesses (maybe it would sell well in Alaska). This falls under the heading of products with incomprehensible names.

We have this annoying tendency to see our current problems as only a recent development. There has been school violence, even on a school-wide scale, for centuries. Way before the paralysis of political correctness, way before permissive parenting, way before video games and action movies, and way before 24-hour video news!

Perspective.

These folks said it right; it's like a fire extinguisher. If bad stuff happens, you want something there to help you survive. It seems to be well-engineered, but it'll all come down to teacher training. Even the best-engineered product can fail in the hands of somebody who doesn't know how to use it. I would hope that this company is producing some well-designed training materials to go with the device.

What would be the best solution? None has been proposed. "the best solution is one that addresses the cause rather than the effect" is not a proposed solution.

When asked to identify the cause, the response was something about waxing political. Sorry, this is clearly more of a political issue than a technological problem. Anyone can build a better door lock. Anyone can build higher fences. Anyone can hire guards. Anyone can hire police, make more rules, attempt to control guns and knives and bricks and sharp pencils, build more prisons, build more asylums, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

There is an elephant in the room, and all anybody can say is "The problem is complicated", or "we need to address the cause, rather than the effect", or "the behaviorists can't figure this out", or "this will take a long time to fix".

In my opinion, not being free to state what the problem is, is another symptom of the problem.

How do we fix a problem when political correctness petrifies us into not even saying what the problem is? Build little plastic blocks to shove under our doors, I guess.

Perhaps we should invent a better shovel, to dig holes in the sand, to stick our heads in.

Then we won't even have to see the problems that we are too afraid to talk about, let alone try to fix them.

I agree with you, tekochip, that would be the best solution. But I think in this case, as many commenters have pointed out (myself included), that problem is a bit too complicated to address as quickly as it needs to be addressed. And so other solutions seem necessary, unfortunately.

Yes, Chuck, you have summed up well what I have tried to express in previous comments. It's so difficult to solve the root of the problem here that these types of measures need to be taken. And it's sad that they do, but this is the way it is right now. While people wish more money was spent on treating the conditions and situations that would cause people to want to cause harm to others by taking guns into schools and shooting them, it's clear that this problem may not be solved for a long time. In the meantime, people must try to protect kids and caretakers and teachers the best way they can.

A few weeks ago, Ford Motor Co. quietly announced that it was rolling out a new wrinkle to the powerful safety feature called stability control, adding even more lifesaving potential to a technology that has already been very successful.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

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